Chapter Text
The first time Bill gets out of trouble with a teacher is in his first year. It's homework- he turned it in late, and standing in front of McGonagall’s desk he’s so, so scared. She looks at him over the rims of h er glasses and demands an explanation. He starts to stutter, but then words he doesn’t remember knowing are falling out of h is mouth, and his voice seems smoother, consoling and smoothing over, making excuses and quietly persuading his professor that it doesn’t matter, that he shouldn’t be punished.
Professor McGonagall blinks twice. Then she lets him go.
Later, he doesn’t know how he does it. The silver-tongued swiftness is hiding in the ba ck of his mind and with it lie hours of diplomacy he never conducted, negotiations he never took part in. Bill thinks of it as a weapon, as he grows up, standing in a darkened kitchen with veterans and scars- he feels at home . These meetings are familiar, this quiet kind of desperation that pervades the air. The thrum of vivid energy to counteract the stifled despair.
In Gringotts, the goblins, to begin with, do not trust him. He accepts that, and a voice in the back of his head murmurs help them, show them, you may need them later. Bill slides into ancient tomb s and makes jokes and learns Gobbledygook- the swearwords first, then kindnesses. One day he looks in a mirror and sees different eyes look back at him, grey stars shining out of a pale face framed with fire.
Bill stops looking in mirrors.
When Greyback tears his claws down his face a strange, old, part of Bill wants to laugh, wants to challenge him, thinks wildly is that the best you can do? Waking up, he finds himself in a new world. Mum seems to be perpetually on the verge of tears, but Fleur has a fierce gleaming joy on her face as she dabs the ointment on his scars. Bill thinks, in an absentminded sort of way, that perhaps everyone expects him to be more shocked than he is now. But he can’t help it. The scars that rip across his face are normal, part of him. He doesn’t ever say that he felt more lost without them.
It's the little things. Sometimes, standing at the kitchen table making battle plans, he forgets that i t’s Voldemort they’re fighting, forgets that his grandfather died of old age and not in the doorway of his father’s stronghold. He looks for a figure with long dark hair braided with gold instinctively before Bill realises he’s not there. Twins with star-bright eyes run in and out of the edges of his vision when he’s very tired, and the fire in the kitchen seems to re ach for him.
Setting his teeth , he avoids the swords that he was so unaccountably good at in Egypt. What matters is his siblings.
He will not let them die again.